Windows Tips & Tricks

Check here each month for tips and tricks to help make your computer use easier and smoother.

Clean up your disks with Disk Cleanup

It was a problem in DOS and it’s even more of a problem today. Even with high capacity disks, wasted space, inefficient disk utilization, and seldom-used files can still have a big impact on your system’s overall performance. Disk performance is the cockroach of today’s computers—it seems like we’ll never get rid of the problem.

There are a lot of good third-party tools on the market to help you optimize your disk subsystem’s performance, but one tool included with Windows 2000  and XP can go a long way toward giving your system a boost.

The Disk Cleanup tool—which you access through Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Cleanup—brings several disk performance tweaks under a single interface. Disk Cleanup will automatically clear out downloaded program files, clear out your Internet Explorer cache, clean out the Recycle Bin, delete temporary files, clean up offline files, compress seldom-used files, and much more. In addition to giving you an easy means to clean up these items, Disk Cleanup also gives you a means of reviewing them beforehand. In the Disk Cleanup window you select the type of item you want to view (such as Temporary Internet Files), and click View Files. Disk Cleanup opens the associated folder so you can review the files before deleting them.

In addition to these disk tweaks, Disk Cleanup also provides a link into the Add/Remove Programs utility to help you remove unused Windows components and uninstall infrequently used applications.